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| Background and Terms of Reference for the Consultancy on the
Formulation of the National Poverty Reduction Strategy
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| 3. The need for an over-arching strategy on poverty reduction |
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Despite the commitment by Government to eliminate poverty as demonstrated by the existence of a wide range of citizen economic empowerment programmes, sustained growth in formal sector employment over the past 35 years of post independence period, the existence of a number of social safety nets and income transfer programmes for the poor and the disadvantaged, access to basic services by a significant proportion of the population, and commendable improvements in the quality of life for the majority, the 1996 BIDPA Poverty Study reported 'sufficient' act of these programmes resulting in significant proportion of the country's population still living below the Poverty Datum Line. The report indicates that as a result of this sub optimum programme impact, the national poverty rate has only declined from 59 percent of the population to 47 percent between 1985 and 1994. It further reported that 55 percent of the rural population was found to be below the poverty datum line compared to 46 percent in urban villages and 29 percent in urban areas.
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Key weakness of these programmes were identified as:
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- Inadequate popular participation in programme design; implementation; and monitoring and evaluation; which resulted 'in poor targeting and under-utilisation of programmes.
- Inadequate co-ordination of poverty programmes leading to failure to capture synergies at both the central and local/district level.
- Inadequate monitoring and evaluation, which means that programme output were not adequately reconciled with targets and gaps were not identified early enough.
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This poverty level no doubt calls for renewed efforts to re-examine the problem, especially how it has been addressed over the years and how the country wishes to deal with it now and in the future. This task is presently constrained by the absence of a cohesive national poverty reduction framework. Past and contemporary efforts at poverty alleviation have largely been ad hoc, inconsistent and lacking synchronization. An effective national poverty strategy should guide, synchronize, co-ordinate and consistently link the various poverty-related sectoral initiatives.
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Based on the fore-going, 'in its 86th and Special Meeting, held in July 2000, the Rural Development Council adopted the Terms of Reference for a consultancy that would Formulate a National Strategy for Poverty Reduction. This consultancy is expected to undertake a comprehensive situational analysis of the problem, particularly with regard to policy gaps, strengths and weaknesses in the design and planning, implementation and monitoring and evaluation of existing related programmes.
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